[Dovecot] writing a plugin for LDA to chain Unix pipes

[Timothy White]

On 7/1/06, Marcus Rueckert <rueckert at informatik.uni-rostock.de> wrote:
> On 2006-07-01 00:39:40 +0200, martin f krafft wrote:
> > I've spent some part of the last week on trying to figure out
> > whether dovecot LDA meets our requirements for a new mail server
> > infrastructure (the IMAP and POP servers, as well as the SASL
> > backend certainly do; thanks a lot!). The one thing that's holding
> > me back is that we need per-user integration of SpamAssassin and
> > some other, custom content filters, all of which are implemented as
> > Unix pipe filters.
>
> run them in your MTA before pushing stuff into the LDA?
>
> e.g. i deliver incoming via lmtp to dspam. dspam reinjects the mail into
> postfix. and postfix calls dovecot-lda to deliver the mail.
>
> works flawlessly here. so i dont see why we should bloat dovecot-lda,
> when most mail server handle that just fine already.

I have to agree. This isn't a LDA function. Content filters are a MTA
function. You should be able to pipe all the filters together, so in
your call to dovecot-lda in your mta, it just changes into one big
pipe... For example

`dspam --stdout| dovecot-lda -d $u`
or
`spamassasin | custom filter| dovecot-lda`
As you said they are all pipe filters, so they should work in a pipe
just fine! (Dspam can be a pain to get working in a pipe sometimes).
The LDA is exactly that, Local Delivery Agent, and should only have to
deliver mail to the correct boxes, the fact that it also filters them
into more than just the Inbox, is a function of the sieve language,
which does not have functions for calling external unix tools.

If you need help setting up the 'pipe' with your mta, feel free to
contact me off list, and if I have enough knowledge of your MTA, will
help you as much as possible.

Tim
-- 
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